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Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by tigers9 on May 2, 2008
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Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
Fla. cracks down as invasion tips ecological balance
Biologist Skip Snow handled a python captured last month in Florida's Everglades National Park. (Joel Achenbach/Washington Post)
Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post / May 3, 2008
BUSHNELL, Fla. - RobRoy MacInnes is the man to see if you want to buy a crocodile. Or a scorpion, a rattlesnake, a boa constrictor. Got a hankering for a cobra? Just pony up $600 and you can have one of the more lethal species.
more stories like this"It is a very effective threat display," MacInnes, 49, said as a Pakistan black cobra, 6 feet long, hissing, hood spread, writhed in its enclosure and repeatedly struck at the thin glass separating the creature from a visitor. "A snake like that, coming at you, you'd leave him alone."
Or simply die of fright.
MacInnes is co-owner of Glades Herp Farms, an empire of claws, spines, scales, fangs, and darting tongues. The reptile trade, he's happy to report, is booming. The pet industry estimates that about 4.8 million households now contain at least one pet reptile, a number that has nearly doubled in a decade. Reptiles are increasingly popular in a crowded, urbanized nation. They don't need a yard. You don't have to take a lizard for a walk.
But biologists see the trade in nonnative creatures as a factor in the rising number of invasive species, such as the Burmese python, which is breeding up a storm in the Everglades, and the Nile monitor lizard, a toothy carnivore that can reach 7 feet in length and has found a happy home along the canals of Cape Coral.
Under a new state law, a customer must obtain a $100 annual permit to buy a monitor lizard or some of the largest snakes - four species of pythons and the green anaconda. The animal must also be implanted with a microchip. That tag could help officials identify the animal if it turns up later in the wild.
MacInnes contends that the government overestimates the threat posed by invasive reptiles. He says he is being blocked by the US Fish and Wildlife Service from importing some commercially attractive animals, such as Fiji Islands iguanas and radiated tortoises from Madagascar.
Even the term "invasive species" is unfair, he said. "They're 'introduced.' I think that 'invasive' is passing judgment."
Of the pythons, he said: "To me, it's a wonderful introduction. I think it's the best thing to happen to the Everglades in the last 200 years."
Biologists, however, say that invasive species, unchecked by natural predators, are major threats to biodiversity. Life on Earth has always moved around, but never so fast. Organisms evolve in niche environments. What happens when the natural barriers are removed? When anything can go anywhere?
Complications ensue.
Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist for Everglades National Park, has helped drag hundreds of Burmese pythons out of the weeds, off roadways, and even from under the hood of a tourist's car. He calls MacInnes's argument "ridiculous." The snakes, he says, are imperiling five endangered species in the Florida Keys, including the Key Largo woodrat, one specimen of which, tagged with a radio transmitter, was tracked all the way to the belly of a python.
The pythons are often seen lying across a road. Usually motorists describe them as resembling a log, as big around as a telephone pole.
At his office in the park, Snow keeps a duffel bag handy. Inside: a python hide rolled up like a rug. He clearly enjoys unfurling it on the conference table because, at 15 1/2 feet long, it spans the length of the table and drapes into a chair at the far end.
No one knows how the snakes went native, but there is speculation that Hurricane Andrew, which obliterated thousands of homes, played a factor in a wholesale python jailbreak in 1992. Many invasive species undergo a lag before proliferating. What is certain is that, by 2002, pythons were seen in multiple locations in remote regions of the Everglades.
Then one morning in early 2003 a group of tourists on the park's Anhinga Trail, a reliable location for viewing wildlife, were startled to see an alligator with a python in its mouth. The snake was coiled around the gator. More than 24 hours later, the python wriggled free and disappeared.
Even more dramatic was what happened in the Everglades in 2005: A python swallowed an alligator and exploded.
This February, the US Geological Survey reported that pythons in Asia inhabit climates that are similar to those in about a third of the continental United States. A USGS map showed the potential python habitat stretching from California to Delaware, but the map was not a prediction.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/05/03/keeping_a_lid_on_exotic_reptiles_gone_wild/
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RE: Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by Phobos on May 3, 2008
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Well, that was a patiently stupid remark, "best thing that has happened to the everglades in 200 years"
Introduced species is one of the worse disasters to native ecosystems that can happen. You don't have to search to far for examples why this is true.
Al
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RE: Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by Chance on May 3, 2008
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Yikes! I can only hope they were quoting bits and pieces of Robroy's statements, or maybe even misquoting him? Surely he's not stupid enough to say things like that to a reporter?!
Of course, then you could see this quote: "he is being blocked by the US Fish and Wildlife Service from importing some commercially attractive animals, such as Fiji Islands iguanas and radiated tortoises from Madagascar." Of course you can't import them any more, they're almost completely gone from their home ranges!
In light of statements like that, I guess you can start to realize where his angle is. Glades has some great animals, but even the biggest dealers in this hobby need to start realizing that opening their mouths at just the right angle might, just might, end their business altogether.
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RE: Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by tigers9 on May 3, 2008
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Is Rob a sarcastic guy? I am extremely sarcastic, and when I talk to people who do not know me, including reporters, I have to be careful what I say so it doesn’t end up out of context or misquoted.
As for the Fiji Iguana and Radiated tortoise imports, my guess is he was talking/complaining about not being able to import captive bred specimens from abroad, NOT wild caught.
I am sure some of you here know him personally, why don't you ask him what he really said and meant?
Go to the source.
Z
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RE: Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by Phobos on May 3, 2008
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Sarcasm is just of of the fine services I offer too however, I don't think that comment was meant to be sarcastic. It's sounds like a justification of what's happened IMO.
Al
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RE: Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by tigers9 on May 3, 2008
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Well, we have too many wild jackrabbits hopping around in front of the cars trying to cause traffic accidnets, , seems like native wildlife/predators (bobcats, cougars, rattlesnakes, coyotes) are NOT doign their job, maybe we need some 'introduced' help so we can fire the local lazy wild animals
(insert sarcasm) ;-)
Z
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RE: Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
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by Cro on May 3, 2008
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Saying something like Burmese Pythons are the "best thing that has happened to the everglades in 200 years" is probably not a good idea.
Lots of bad things have happened to the glades, like the Army Corps of Engineers. Those nitwhits have never gotten anything right. They screwed up the Everglades, they have screwed up lakes and reservoirs in many states, and they have screwed up the Okefenokee Swamp in building the Suwannee River Sill.
There is a lot of frustration folks have when they see a natural resource that has been changed and damaged by a Government Agency.
In a way, I can understand a Monkey Wrench Gang setting fires in the Okefenokee, or releasing Burmese Pythons in the Glades, or causing bulldozers not to run when they are covering over a Gopher Tortiose communtiy. But of course, I would never suggest that folks do things like that.
Best Regards JohnZ
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